


Five Things Renee Wears That Make Jack Crazy

by leigh57



Category: 24
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 20:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leigh57/pseuds/leigh57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I think the title pretty much sums it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Renee Wears That Make Jack Crazy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adrenalin211](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrenalin211/gifts).



> This fic takes place in one of the many AUs that exist mostly in my email inbox and adrenalin211's. In this particular AU, Jack and Renee have a daughter, the result of a birth control snafu. If family or babyfic is not your thing, you will definitely want to move on to something else!

1.

The day she was released from the hospital, he showed up with a dozen pink and red lilies and a pair of earrings -- tiny round emerald studs set in white gold. (He’d stood in front of the display for almost an hour, hoping the polite guy behind the counter wouldn’t decide to punch him when he rejected the twentieth pair.) She put them in the second she opened the box, eyes shiny, disinfectant coating her fingers as she checked the backing to make sure it was secure.

She hasn’t taken them off since.

Not once.

But she fiddles with them unconsciously, all the time. No matter what she’s doing -- reading the latest Alice Hoffman with her body curled into the couch cushions, stirring white sauce on the stove while she sways to the Coltrane playing on Songza, humming off-key to Meredith as she rocks her to sleep -- he loves to watch Renee’s fingers reach for the tactile reminder of the day the hospital doors swished closed behind him with her on the _outside._

Still, he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that he appreciates the earrings most when they’re the only thing she’s wearing, when he has her beneath him in their bed, flushed and breathless. Sometimes, even when she’s so worked up and restless that he can barely fight the distraction of her hips pushing up into his, he’ll hold her still, hands on both sides of her neck, hair smoothed away from her jaw. He’ll outline the green circle on her earlobe with the edge of his tongue, three or four times, feel her shiver, listen to the way her breath catches when she _really_ wants him to get on with it.

And he’ll finally resume the rhythm, kissing her so he can feel it when she says his name.

The slight lingering chill of the metal vanishes against the warmth of her tongue.

2.

She keeps the ribbed purple shirt she was wearing the morning she was shot.

And she wears it.

Not often.

But every couple of months she grabs it like it’s any other shirt in her dresser and pulls it on, her own personal _fuck you_ to everything that happened that day.

(And everything that _almost_ happened.)

In his mind, the shirt is forever frozen in the mental snapshot he took when CTU dragged him away from the hospital so he could come back to the scene and “help fill in a few details.” (He held his cell in a death grip the entire time, begging it to ring. Begging it not to.) The purple shirt half-covered his black long-sleeved tee, mixed in with a pile of clothes on the side of the room where the floor _wasn’t_ covered with blood and glass.

He hates the goddamn shirt.

(She knows he hates it. But she needs to wear it more than he needs her not to.)

And he gets that, so he never says a word.

3.

She has a standard black wool coat she wears to work in the winter. It’s unexceptional in every way, down to the blend-in buttons.

Unexceptional.

Except that one windy afternoon when Meredith was maybe nine months old (when they were both so continually exhausted that sex, on the rare occasions when it happened, took maybe ten minutes and was about as interesting as the coat), he came back from the pharmacy to find her not only home from work four hours early, but standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, apple spice candle burning red behind her, wearing _nothing but the black coat_.

Her eyes had that dangerous glow; the edges of her mouth tilted up as she licked her lips.

He tried to focus on her words and not the shape of her mouth when she said, _I was eating my shitty peanut butter and jelly sandwich at my desk when I realized we haven’t spent an hour alone in at least a month. So I called Kim and she took Meredith for the night. What do you think we should do with our time?_

He’d been working on a response when she shrugged off the coat and went down on him right there.

He remembers his fingers gripping the counter, eyes closed while he tried to breathe, tried to process the slide of her hair against his thigh and the vibration that sparked up his stomach when he felt the heat of her mouth.

That was only the beginning of the things they did to each other that afternoon, an afternoon that stretched into evening and ended with the two of them drinking Pinot Noir in the master bathroom tub, the hot damp skin of her back pressed against his chest, soap bubbles sliding off her knees. He can still feel her shaking with laughter at some stupid-ass thing he said, her voice low and mischievous. _Don’t you think we should do this more often? Because I do._

Now, when she absently grabs for that coat in the morning, coffee and keys in her other hand, eyes scanning the room for anything she might have forgotten, he has to think about the clog in the kitchen sink or the seafood section of Vons so he’s not quite so tempted to turn her goodbye kiss into something she doesn’t have time to finish.

4.

Even if she’s so cold that she has goosebumps all over and can’t speak without her teeth chattering, she refuses to wear socks in the house.

Once she’s inside, she yanks them off the second she remembers their existence.

At first, it drives him insane.

Socks by the door, under the coffee table, next to the bed, squished in the sheets. Dress socks, gym socks, the socks with the pink dinosaurs and green pom-poms that Kim bought her as a stocking stuffer last Christmas (as hilarious and hideous as they were intended to be).

But one evening, when Renee is hours late and hasn’t even left the office, when Meredith won’t stop screaming because the antibiotics for her ear infection haven’t quite kicked in, when he’s discovered the third discarded pair of Renee’s balled up socks in ten minutes and he finds himself _this close_ to cursing out loud, he pauses, looking at the fabric clutched in his hand.

_Two inches higher and there wouldn’t be socks anywhere._

The panicky chest compression that always accompanies the memories forces him to stop and breathe. His eyes sting, his throat hurts, and if he had a free hand, he’d text her right now. (They have a system for when this happens, one emoticon with a ridiculous amount of power.)

Meredith stops crying and rests her head on his shoulder while remnant hiccups from the shrieking jag shake her every couple seconds. He hugs his daughter closer; her fleece pajamas smell like her mother’s perfume.

That night, after Renee finally convinces Meredith to go to sleep, she pads into the living room in yoga pants and a worn grey hoodie she stole from his drawer. She drops down on the couch, scooting until her head is settled in his lap. With her crossword book in one hand and a pencil in her mouth, she peels off her socks and tosses them onto the hardwood.

They’re inside-out just like Meredith’s always are (he’ll have to invert them when he does the laundry) and he smiles, smoothing his hand over Renee’s forehead and through her hair.

“What?” she mumbles against the pencil, before she pulls it out of her mouth and fills in two down with _Watergate_.

He watches her bare feet burrow under the polartec blanket. “Doesn’t matter,” he says.

It’s the truth.

5.

Meredith makes Renee a tie-dyed t-shirt in her preschool art class.

It’s shapeless and huge, “one size fits all,” and most of it is an unclassifiable shade of burgundy-brown, punctuated here and there with a green or pink dot for flavor. (Apparently Meredith applies her ‘more is better’ philosophy to her art projects, as well as to everything else.)

Renee knots the extra fabric on the side and wears it everywhere -- to the grocery store, the movies, dinner at Kim’s.

(It’s disorienting, watching her do for the first time now all the things he did for the first time so long ago that he has to consult the huge intimidating books almost as often as she does.

Some of her reactions surprise him, like the way she turns out to be philosophical about the all night scream fests, walking from the hall to the living room and back again with Meredith yelling over her shoulder and _Aliens_ blinking muted on the TV.

Other reactions don’t, like the fact that she’ll walk out of Meredith’s room, cheeks pink with anger, muttering, “ _You_ get her to pick a dress. Five tries and I’m done. Is she going to be reasonable _in this lifetime?_ ")

When Renee wears the shirt to the PTO meeting about the playground reconstruction project, one of the other moms raises a sardonic eyebrow and leans over to whisper, “Wow, you’re brave enough to actually _wear_ that thing out of the house?”

Renee stares at her, forehead scrunched, eyes confused. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Jack can’t stop himself from coughing into the arm of his shirt. When he mutters, “Excuse me,” and gets up to grab a drink of water, he doesn’t even make the aisle before the grin hits him like a shaped charge.


End file.
